Environmentalists say that getting people to let go of a common plastic product could be a first step in a larger and much-needed shift away from plastics. More than 79% of all plastic waste ends up in landfills or gets stuck in the natural world.

But in the grand scheme of things, banning straws won't make a big dent in that overall problem. According to Bloomberg News, if all 8.3 billion plastic straws that are found along beaches across the globe suddenly washed into the ocean, it would still only account for 0.03% of the 8 million metric tons of plastic that goes into the water annually.

Of course, there are plenty of other types of litter that are more common — and more detrimental — than straws. Keep scrolling to see which ones.

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4.5 trillion cigarette butts are littered every year.

A man taps ashes off his cigarette into an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts on a table.
Srdjan Zivulovic/Reuters

At least 640,000 tons of fishing gear are dropped into the ocean every year.

Fishing gear dropped into the ocean is called ghost gear.
Heng Sinith/AP Images

Abandoned fishing gear, also called ghost gear, is a problem in our oceans. According to a report from the World Animal Protection, at least 640,000 tons of fishing gear is dumped into the ocean annually.

Over 1.5 million plastic bottles were collected from coastlines in 2016.

Think about switching to a reusable bottle.
Reuters/Nicky Loh

According to a report done after the 2016 International Coastal Cleanup (an annual global event where volunteers clean up coastlines over the course of a day), over 1.5 million plastic bottles were recovered around the globe during that event.

That could make them the second-most common piece of litter globally, behind cigarette butts.

The event sees millions of volunteers across the US and more than 100 countries clean up trash and record each item collected from lakes, rivers, and beaches.

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Bottle caps are a choking hazard for marine animals.

According to the North Sea Foundation, a Dutch NGO with a focus on protecting the North Sea, plastic caps are among the top five most deadly ocean trash items because marine mammals, birds, and fish see the brightly colored caps as food, and then choke on them.